In order for an application module running on a host computer in a network to provide acceptable performance to the clients accessing it, the application module must be both reliable and available. In order to provide acceptable performance, schemes are required for detecting the failure of an application module or the entire host computer running it, and for then quickly recovering from such a detected failure. Replication of the application module on other host computers in the network is a well known technique that can be used to improve reliability and availability of the application module.
Three strategies are known in the art for operating and configuring the fail-over process as it applies to the replicas, or backup copies, of an application module and which define a state of preparedness for these backups. In the first strategy, known as a "cold backup" style, only the primary copy of an application module is running on a host computer and other backup copies remain idle on other host computers in the network. When a failure of the primary copy of the application module is detected, the primary copy of the application module is either restarted on the same host computer, or one of the backup copies of the application module is started on one of the other host computers, which backup then becomes the new primary. By using a checkpointing technique to periodically take "snapshots" of the running state of the primary application module, and storing such state in a stable storage media, when a failure of the primary application module is detected, the checkpoint data of the last such stored state of the failed primary application module is supplied to the backup application module to enable it to assume the job as the primary application module and continue processing from such last stored state of the failed primary application module.
The second strategy is known as a "warm backup" style. Unlike the cold backup style in which no backup of an application module is running at the same time the primary application module is running, in the warm backup style one or more backup application modules run simultaneously with the primary application module. The backup application modules, however, do not receive and respond to any client requests, but periodically receive state updates from the primary application module. Once a failure of the primary application module is detected, one of the backup application modules is quickly activated to take over the responsibility of the primary application module without the need for initialization or restart, which increases the time required for the backup to assume the processing functions of the failed primary.
The third strategy is known as a "hot backup" style. In accordance with this style, two or more copies of an application module are active at run time. Each running copy can process client requests and states are synchronized among the multiple copies. Once a failure in one of the running application modules is detected, any one of the other running copies is able to immediately take over the load of the failed copy and continue operations.
Unlike the cold backup strategy in which only one primary is running at any given time, both the warm backup and hot backup strategies advantageously can tolerate the coincident failure of more than one copy of a particular application module running in the network, since multiple copies of that application module type are simultaneously running on the network.
Each of the three replication strategies incur different run-time overheads and have different recovery times. One application module running on a network may need a different replication strategy based on its availability requirements and its run time environment than another application module running on the same host computer or a different host computer within the network. Since distributed applications often run on heterogeneous hardware and operating system platforms, the techniques to enhance an application module's reliability and availability must be able to accommodate all the possible replication schemes.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,748,882 issued on May. 5, 1998 to Y. Huang, a co-inventor of the present invention, which patent is incorporated herein by reference, an apparatus and a method for fault tolerant computing is disclosed. As described in that patent, an application or process is registered with a "watchdog" daemon which then "watches" the application or process for a failure or hangup. If a failure or hangup of the watched application is detected, then the watchdog restarts the application or process. In a multi-host distributed system on a network, a watchdog daemon at a host computer monitors registered applications or processes on its own host computer as well as applications or processes on another host computer. If a watched host computer fails, the watchdog daemon that is watching the failed host computer restarts the registered processes or applications that were running on the failed watched node on its own node. In both the single node and multiple node embodiments, the replication strategy for restarting the failed process or application is the cold backup style, i.e., a new replica process or application is started only upon the failure of the primary process or application.
Disadvantageously, prior art fault-tolerant methodologies have not considered and are not adaptable to handle multiple different replication strategies, such as the cold, warm and hot backup styles described above, that might best be associated with each individual application among a plurality of different applications that may be running on one or more machines in a network. Furthermore, no methodology exists in the prior art for maintaining a constant number of running applications in the network for the warm and hot backup replication styles.